June 2013

06/30/2013

An Egyptian protester waves a national flag as Egyptians gather in Tahrir Square during a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt's Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration.

06/29/2013

Todd Saunders (L) and U.S. Army Captain Michael Potoczniak (R), partner of ten years, look at their marriage license at city hall in San Francisco, June 29, 2013. Same-sex couples rushed to San Francisco's City Hall on Saturday to be legally married after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals officially ended California's ban on gay marriage following a landmark ruling at the Supreme Court this week.

06/28/2013

A radio-controlled Superman plane, flown by designer Otto Dieffenbach, passes the moon during a test flight in San Diego, California recently. Otto and business partner Ed Hanley have a small start-up company that creates flying radio-controlled planes, designed in the form of people, characters and objects, for commercial and promotional uses.

06/27/2013

A train passing through a food market in Maeklong, some 60 kilometers south-west of Bangkok. Several times a day, shopkeepers swiftly pack up their food stalls and pull back their canopies to let the trains pass. Once the trains have rumbled through, the crates of vegetables, fish and eggs, are heaved back into their position along the tracks and shoppers return to the tracks they use as a path through the market. Every day hundreds of tourists armed with cameras flock to the picturesque Maeklong market to witness the well-oiled routine.

06/26/2013

Astronauts (L-R) Zhang Xiaoguang, Nie Haisheng and Wang Yaping salute after returning to earth in the re-entry capsule of China's Shenzhou-10 spacecraft at its main landing site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 26, 2013. The three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Wednesday, after a successful 15-day mission in which they docked with a manned space laboratory.

A haunting series of portraits of women who had limbs amputated after the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh on April 24, 2013. It was the worst disaster in the history of the garment industry — 1,129 people were killed, and many others were grievously injured. Canadian photojournalist Kevin Frayer of The Associated Press photographed nine of these women in June 2013, as they recovered at Enam Medical College in Savar, Bangladesh. Their injuries are serious; the stories horrifying. As AP notes on its blog:

Arms and legs were trapped under the building rubble, forcing
rescuers with no medical training to perform amputations on the spot to
free the victims. No anesthesia was available. Some of the rescuers used
butchers knives or hacksaws to cut through the flesh and save the
trapped workers. Many of those freed are still recovering.

...

Bangladesh's government and garment manufacturers are campaigning to
close dangerous factories and to make safety a priority for the
country's most valuable export industry. But many in the government, the
industry and the rescue workers said they would not be shocked if
another terrible tragedy happened.

Mariyam, 30, worked on the 6th floor. She had her right arm amputated to free her after nearly 72 hours in the rubble.

06/22/2013

A plane carrying a wing walker crashed at the Vectren Air Show in Dayton, Ohio, and exploded into flames Saturday, killing the pilot and stunt walker instantly, authorities said. A video posted on WHIO-TV shows the plane turn upside-down as the performer sits on top of the wing (Jane Wicker, reportedly the wing walker performing, demonstrated her routine for WDTN earlier). The plane then tilts and crashes to the ground, erupting into flames as spectators screamed. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said.

This sequence of photos, by Thanh V Tran of The Associated Press, captures the horrific accident.